13.15-13.50 Talk 1
Maris Boyd Gillette, Professor of Social Anthropology, School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg

"Processes in the postindustrial city"
Like industrial cities, post-industrial cities must be created. What are the processes through which a post-industrial city is "built" or "unbuilt"? In this talk I explore how social scientists have conceptualized deindustrialization in urban milieus, focusing particularly on the literature in the field of heritage studies. I argue that the terms we use to discuss the postindustrial city affect what we are able to see. In my reading, the scholarship on heritage in former industrial cities should render more visible the class implications of post-industrial processes.

"Claiming the contradictions of post-industrial urban wastelands"
Abandoned industrial sites in the contemporary urban landscape make up ambiguous physical spaces. On the one hand, the post-industrial sites can offer rare social arenas, critical habitats for flora and fauna in a spontaneous rewilding process, increasingly valued aesthetics, and imaginative possibilities for memory work and future prospects. On the other hand, these wastelands bear connotations of danger, uncontrolled physical change and decay, ugliness, and sole vacuum awaiting new development investments. Depending on the level of exploitation pressure, available economic resources and local approaches and claims, urban wastelands have followed different trajectories of change in different places and in different periods of time. In this talk, I will highlight how a number of contrasting understandings concerning, for example, nature and culture, past and future, promise and threat, value and waste, perform an increasing level of entanglement within the contradictions of post-industrial urban wastelands.

"Negotiotions over urban pasts and futures in the post-industrial city"
In the years 2010-2011 the past and the future overlapped - physically and mentally - in the old run-down and re-used industrial area by Gustaf Dalénsgatan on Hisingen, close to the harbour in Gothenburg. With the closing down of the small factories here in the 1970s, garages, mosques, flea-markets, import grocery stores, motorcycle associations and sex shops had found affordable premises in the old buildings. But at this time the southern part of the area was about to be demolished and transformed into a modern residential area - New Kvillebäcken. During the walking interviews Helena Holgersson conducted here in this early stage of the redevelopment process, employees from the construction companies pointed at imaginary buildings planned to be erected within a few years while local people pointed at already demolished buildings, as if they were still there. In this presentation she will use this case to reflect on how both the past and the future are negotiated in the post-industrial city. By introducing the concept ofdiscursive displacement she will discuss what the democratic consequences might be when (some) former inhabitants of places such as the Gustaf Dalén area are written out of both future visions and historical narratives.